[Wormlight] The Discussion on Mobile Games Continues With Sony’s Chris Mahoney

Games Industry International has the report on Chris Mahoney’s talk at the recent Appsworld conference regarding console versus mobile gaming.

Though Mahoney freely admits that mobile games are raking in some good dough and it’s easy to publish on the platform, he also suggests that porting console games to phones and tablets can be problematic. Part of the reason why is obvious: the console experience is not like the mobile experience. Even though mobile gaming is on the rise, the format is generally geared towards passing the time when you’re out somewhere for just a few minutes. A console experience is designed to be much more immersible and time-consuming, so a straight port just wouldn’t work.

Though initially it looks like his argument is that console games just shouldn’t be transferred to mobile, the real message is that they should simply be different experiences (a reiteration of my Wormlight feature last week with Amir Rao) and that there’s room in the industry for both console experiences and mobile experiences.

For now, it would appear that Sony is learning as much as they can about the platform so they could better serve its audience. I feel like this is the right approach, and I look forward to seeing what comes out of their development. For more details and direct quotations from Mahoney, I suggest reading the above-linked article.